"My mission is to empower people of all ages, races, and body sizes to embrace the body they have been given and learn to love themselves so they can live their dreams."
-Sarah Maria
"Working with Sarah Maria has helped me to see that I am inherently loveable, beautiful, and valuable, no matter what. She has given me tools and techniques to break free from self-hatred and put love in its place. I am incredibly grateful for her and her incredible program. I recommend this book for anyone who wants to love her body and lover her life."
-Gabrielle Forleo, age twenty-six
Program Consultant,
Chopra Center for Wellbeing
"Sarah Maria's teachings are an amazing gift. It's an outstanding program that has changed my life! I highly recommend Sarah Maria's program to anyone who wants to experience living their most successful, beautiful life."
-Mary Schmidt, age forty-five
"Sarah Maria has shared many tools with me. But much more important to me, and what has been most meaningful, has been her quality of compassion. It is a gift and is like a gentle, deep awakening. Sarah Maria is a remarkable individual who works with the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual person. I cannot thank her in a way that seems adequate"
-Leigh Ann Jones, age fifty-four
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Eating Disorders: The Key to Happiness?
Eating disorders are just one other dysfunctional attempt to achieve lasting peace and happiness. This is not meant to minimize the horrible and destructive nature of eating disorders, but it is meant to bring some insight into a complex phenomenon.
Eating disorders: anorexia, bulimia, compulsive eating, diabulimia, and other disorders, convince the sufferer if she listens to and follows the commands of the eating disorder, she will find lasting peace and happiness. If she just does what the eating disorder commands, whether it is eat, or starve, or purge, happiness will be the result.
The reality is happiness can never be achieved in this way. Lasting happiness is not achieved when we accomplish something. We can experience fleeting moments of satisfaction, but not lasting happiness. Lasting happiness is only had in the hear-and-now, the present moment, never in the future.
Science has discovered some important facts about happiness. All people have a happiness set-point, a pre-determined level of happiness that they will naturally return to unless they do something proactive to change it. This happiness set-point is 50% genetic, 10% circumstantial, and 40% habits and behaviors. Only 10% of this set-point is based on circumstance, which means that whether you experience a horrible tragedy or blissful ecstasy, your happiness set-point will return to where it was after one year.
Many people who struggle with eating disorders don’t realize that their primary motivation is happiness. The fact is the underlying goal of all human behavior is happiness, and eating disorders are no different.
There is the belief, perhaps not fully conscious, that when I am thin, then I will be happy. When I eat this food, then I will be happy. Unfortunately, the lasting happiness never comes.
You might lose weight, and you might experience momentary satisfaction, but then your happiness set point returns to where it was before you lost the weight. Whenever you listen to the commands of the disorder and binge, purge, or starve, you will experience an immediate sense of relief, perhaps even a sense of satisfaction.
Unfortunately, this fleeting feeling just creates the need to listen to the eating disorder again and again until you are caught in an intricate web of suffering.
The chance to break free from eating disorders comes when you discover that you can never find happiness, peace, and satisfaction by listening to the disorder.
The opportunity comes when you decide to go after happiness directly and abandon all hope that the eating disorder will produce anything other than pain and misery. This abandonment of hope can be intensely traumatic: you have finally renounced the voice that you have been listening to and following for years. It can feel like there is nothing other than an endless abyss that you must somehow navigate through.
But it is from this place of hopelessness that you can begin to heal. You must forsake the eating disorder with all its false promises and claims. From that place, you can begin to heal and find true happiness and beauty that remains forever, regardless of your body weight.